


Skinny Love (just last the year)

by foreverhalffull



Series: Blue-Grey [2]
Category: Cormoran Strike Series - Robert Galbraith
Genre: Aftermath of a Case, But not for funsies, Established Relationship, F/M, They're in St. Mawes, implied suicidal ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:02:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25564024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foreverhalffull/pseuds/foreverhalffull
Summary: In the aftermath of a case that went bad, Cormoran suggests a getaway to St. Mawes.
Relationships: Robin Ellacott/Cormoran Strike
Series: Blue-Grey [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1964494
Comments: 8
Kudos: 42





	Skinny Love (just last the year)

**Author's Note:**

> I was meant to be writing something else for work, but this demanded to be released from my brain before I could focus on anything else. I would recommend listening to the following piano cover as you read for ultimate emotional destruction: https://youtu.be/nJj1W6Pa0Fk

It was quiet.

That was, of course, partly the reason Strike had booked the secluded seaside cottage. He could tell, despite her assurances of mental wellbeing, that Robin had been struggling after they’d closed a case, weeks before, in the worst of ways. It wasn’t unheard of that they closed a case due to a client’s death, but it was rare that the death was so directly linked to the subject of their investigation.

She had been hiding her suffering well, which was of little comfort to Strike, as he knew it was living with Matthew that had taught her to slip quietly out of bed and have her panic attacks in the bathroom. He suspected the arsehole hadn’t noticed the exhaust fan which turned on automatically with the light, or maybe their Albury Street house hadn’t been so equipped.

He suspected this was where he would find her now, as he woke from their afternoon nap to a silent, empty bed, but the bathroom was empty. The kitchen and the sitting room were also dark and silent, lit only dimly by the setting sun glinting off the harbor. It was then, through the window above the dining table, that he saw her form silhouetted darkly against the shimmering water.

He began to make his way down the lawn to where she stood, on the boat ramp installed to launch the kayaks provided by the rental cottage, but the slope was covered in slippery straw and large rocks, making his descent slow and treacherous. 

He worried not about the noise he was making, grumbling and swearing as he went. Though she had hidden the panic attacks well, it was this first sign of unwellness he’d detected: she startled whenever spoken to, even during conversation. Her brow furrowed more often, and her tea went constantly cold, forgotten.

Finally he reached the wooden seawall, which was at least level, save for the occasional errant nail. He could see her in profile now as he approached form her left.

Robin was clothed in the floor-length silk dressing gown he’d gifted her on her thirty-fifth birthday, having chosen it specifically to match the blue-grey shade of her eyes. It billowed around her legs, floating on the surface of the sea as she was standing in two feet of water and wading, almost imperceptibly, toward the horizon where her gaze rested, unfocused, on Pendennis Castle and the distant shore. 

“Robin?”

Calling out to her was his best bet. He’d noticed when they’d kayaked the day before that the surface of the ramp was slick with algae and doubted his false foot would be able to find purchase. At nearly fifty, he wasn’t exactly as agile as even his younger one-legged self had been.

“Robin!” 

She turned this time, and though she was looking directly at him still did not quite meet his gaze. Her face was drenched, uniformly wet with tears but no visible tracks down her cheeks, which seemed to be painted a paler shade of the same hue as her hair. 

“Are you alright, love?”

Her eyes closed and she shook her head, chin gently upturned, thrice. Her arms remained resolutely stick-straight at her sides. 

She began to tremble then, as she remembered the case she had botched utterly. It was the mother who had engaged their services, concerned that her daughter’s husband was abusive and seeking the necessary evidence to put him away. 

Robin remembered the forceful NO she had given her husband, suitcases in the doorway, not unlike the one she’d later served to the pervy Geraint Wynn. She’d often anguished over what may have been, had she lacked the courage to stand up to Matthew, or he the vanity to heed her threats of exposure and professional ruin. 

She’d never lost, either, the smallest pearl of convicted redemption which had not been crushed to dust upon Strike’s long-ago sacking her. This had been the awareness of protecting Alyssa’s daughters from cycles of victimization, but the pride in her long-ago heroics faded now as she had failed to protect this mother’s daughter.

“I failed her, Cormoran. It’s my fault she’s dead. I failed them both.”

She moved her arms now, crossing them around the slight indention just below her ribs, which had appeared in recent weeks.

“That’s not true, Robin. What happened is Andrew’s fault, not yours or anyone else’s. He’s the killer here, and we’ll get him put away yet.”

The sun was slipping behind the hills across the water now, and a gentle breeze picked up off the sea, its saltwater scent reminiscent of tears.

“How can you say that? Imagine we had a child, Cormoran, and we’d hired someone to protect her and she died on their watch? Would you not hold me accountable?” 

Her words mixed with sobs that came in routine intervals, eventually devolving into hiccups so strong she felt her chest was collapsing. He didn’t miss the casual swap of pronouns as she slipped out of the hypothetical and into the present.

“No, Robin, love. I would not hold you accountable, and neither does Erica’s mother, because it isn’t. Your. Fault.”

Her hands clenched into fists as she turned in a wide circle that took her deeper into the sea, waist-level now, with her head tipped back toward the sky. The dressing gown created a cape-like radius on the water’s surface around her as she yelled.

“But it is! It is, Cormoran! It was I who spooked her at the shops, but if I’d managed to befriend her, we could have gotten a confession weeks before! And it was I who believed him when I overheard Andrew saying he’d be overseas on business for a week! If we hadn’t stopped surveilling him, we would have noticed. And saved her.”

She devolved into hiccup-sobs once more, and her last sentence was a whisper.

“It was me, Cormoran.”

She began to sink down into a squatting position which brought her chin gurglingly close to the water’s surface. 

Strikes wiped at his sopping, teary face. He’d cursed his disability many times, but never with so much conviction as this moment, when he wanted nothing more than to wade into the water and carry her into the safety of the cottage, but he knew such an attempt would drown them both.

“Come here, little one.” 

The diminutive had begun as a joke years ago, as it was mockingly at odds with Robin’s fierce character, but it felt fitting now, as he wanted nothing more than to shelter her under his arms and never let go.

Blessedly, she heeded and walked through the water toward the sea wall where he stood, finally resting her upper arms and head upon it. With difficulty, he managed to sit, legs outstretched and grasp onto her upper arms, pulling until she collapsed onto his chest. It sent him sprawling backward, both of them sopping wet now as she lay atop him.

“You’ll have to let me go again, Cormoran. I’m a liability, you can’t keep me on and watch as I continually kill off our clients. It’ll ruin the business, and then you.”

“The way you feel now, Robin, the way that you care – though I’d like you to see someone who can help you manage it healthily – is precisely why I love having you in our office and our home. Your kind, detail-oriented, compassionate spirit protects our clients. It doesn’t harm them, or me.”

He knew the intricacies of her heart as well as he knew the scar pattern on his right knee and could feel, as surely as it was beating against his now, the same empathy which had driven her to Brockbank’s Shoreditch flat twelve years ago radiating out of it, deep within her chest wall.

“You do know, don’t you, that what you did with Brockbank was the right choice? I didn’t fire you because you made that decision without me, or because you sent Brockbank running.”

He’d assumed, over the intervening years, that she must have known this. She was a bloody good detective, and how could she have taken him back, as a boss, a partner, and then a friend and lover and husband, without knowing? How could she have trusted him?

But as she looked up at him now, bewildered, he realized she hadn’t known.

“Oh God, Robin, I thought you had realized, when I told you about the fake newspaper ad with Culpepper, that… I wanted you away from the case. I didn’t want Laing to strike again; I had to protect you, but… if you hadn’t taken matters into your own hands, we would have done it together.

“You made the right choice then. And you made as good of choices as you could have in this case, and I understand why you think you messed up. But you’re by leaps and bounds the better half of Strike and Ellacott Investigative Services, and of me.

“So no, I’m not letting go of you, Ellacott. Not now, not ever. Got it?”

“Yeah.”

She sniffled, hiccupped, and buried her face into the dip between his collarbones. When she spoke again, it was muffled by his greying chest hair.

“Your knee alright?”

He wouldn’t have released the slight assurance of her safety provided by her presence in his arms for anything, even if she were blocking all blood flow to his leg and he had to get the rest of it removed. 

So he squeezed her tighter.

“Yeah.”


End file.
